Deadly Sweet

 

Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) is a recognized watershed moment in film history that took the funny little cartoons shown before feature films and made them into an attraction in and of themselves. While Walt Disney did not invent animation, he pushed it beyond the bounds of what was thought possible. It’s hard to imagine nearly 77 years later that many industry insiders predicted the film would be a flop – it’s said even his brother Roy and his wife Lillian urged him to abandon the idea. I’ve read other accounts that Walt inflated the number of naysayers to serve his image as both a visionary and a Hollywood outsider. Regardless, Snow White an incredible hit that set archetypes used in animated films for decades to come: beautiful princess (who sings), handsome, dashing prince (who also sings), adorable helpers for the princess (in later films the Dwarfs were replaced with animals) and the wicked, jealous Stepmother.

Of course in Snow White, the Evil Queen isn’t just your garden-variety wicked stepmother like Lady Tremaine in Cinderella. No, she’s a super powerful sorceress with an all-seeing Enchanted Mirror and a laboratory filled with ancient tomes of horrid spells and insidious magical paraphernalia. You can tell the Disney Animators (the famed Nine Old Men) had a great time working on the Evil Queen; her scenes are full of the most  electrifying drama in the entire film.

Unfortunately, I could only find a version without her dialogue

The scene where she retreats to her dungeon lair after finding the Huntsman has duped her and transforms herself into an ugly old crone before finally creating the poisoned apple has always been my favorite of the film (I’m a sucker for bad guys and dungeon lairs.) But my favorite part of this great scene occurs when the Queen/Crone pulls the apple from the roiling vats of poisonous potion. As the apple  hangs above the cauldron, potion runs off and clearly becomes a leering skull before returning to a gorgeous red apple.

Poison apple spell scene–unfortunately in French

I know I’m not the only one who loves this gag (as the animators would call it.) You need only run an image search on the internet and you find page upon page of of arts, crafts, cakes, shirts and even tattoos using this design. If you visit Walt Disney World’s Downtown Disney, you can get an actual candy poison apple made at The Candy Cauldron (at least around the Halloween season.)

 

Most of the modern depictions of the apple-with-skull show the skull as a bright green color reminiscent of Maleficent’s skin tone – like the apples above. When I created Deadly Sweet, I decided to go with more screen accurate blue-to-whitish liquid. I achieved this effect by starting with a piece of partially transparent white vellum and lightly coloring with blue Prismacolor pencil which I could then blend out. I also used Clear Plastic Nonglas as a substrate for the bubbling steam and the allow the apple to appear suspended in air. I think these techniques worked quite well to achieve the look from the film.

 

Additional images:

 

Deadly Sweet is currently for sale in my Etsy Shop for $45

“The Best and Worst Sign You’ll see at Walt Disney World.”

It’s January again, the time of year traditionally (if arbitrarily) set aside for reflection, re-examination and resolutions. As the chaos of the holiday season waned and passed into 2014, I decided this was year when I would finally begin to focus on my artistic endeavors and move them from a hobby to a professional venture. I’ve set a goal for myself of producing many more pieces than I have in the past, enough to fill out my Etsy store, participate in some local arts &crafts shows and hopefully even be a part of some group gallery shows.

I’d like to use this blog not only as a showcase of my new works, but also a place to give a peek-behind-the-curtain of my projects. I’d like to post not only how I made the pieces ( I’m a total process nerd) but also the “Why.” I believe you can gain a lot of insight about a work from why an artist choose a certain subject. Think of this as the Bonus Features on a DVD.

To kick off 2014, here is a piece I finished just last week titled, “The Best and Worst Sign You’ll see at Walt Disney World.”


            
“Uh… What’s with the bus stop sign?” I’ll admit that it seems like an odd choice, but this bus stop sign has two things I love: wonderful, nostalgic design and it’s the signal that I’m at Walt Disney World, that my vacation has really begun.

The impetus for this project came in August as my excitement grew over our impending November 2013 trip to Walt Disney World. It’s no secret that my family are Disney Fanatics or more correctly: Disney Obsessed. We’re THOSE people. The ones other people shake their heads and wonder about. Our particular obsession? Disney Parks. Make the mistake of mentioning Magic Kingdom and you’ll be in for an afternoon-long, for-Pete’s-sake-please-let-me-escape discussion of park history, tips and other minutiae. We own and frequently listen to Disney Park Music (I’m currently listen to the Magic Kingdom Entrance loop.) We know the names of Imagineers and can point out their contributions to particular attractions. We delight in finding Hidden Mickeys (my older daughter Katie recently found one in an episode of Dr. Who.) In short, we love the special brand of magic and attention to detail the Disney Cast Members bring to every aspect of your vacation.

For any Disney Resort Guest flying into Orlando International, Disney’s Magical Express is the first experience with this all-encompassing magic. Just follow the signs through the airport, past all the poor non-resort schlubbs awaiting their luggage, and you will find yourself greeted by friendly cast members who will direct you to the huge, Streamline-Modern-themed motor coaches complete with bathrooms, Air conditioning and video screens full of the awesomeness you’ll soon witness. Wait a minute! What about your luggage? Once you drop your luggage off at your home airport, you don’t need to worry about it until you head home. By Disney magic, it will appear in your hotel room within three hours. All you need do is sit back and relax during the half-hour trip to your resort. Of course, you’re heading DISNEY WORLD so who can relax?

“Okay, that why it’s the best sign, so why is it the worst?” Easy enough answer – the next time you see that same Magical Express sign is when you are sitting on a bench waiting to be taken back to the airport at the end of your trip. Seriously, there are very few things sadder than leaving Disney World. Katie was sobbing almost uncontrollably as we waited.                                                                         Our bus arriving to take us to the airport.

Here are a couple of additional pictures I used for reference:
    


"The Best and Worst Sign You'll See at Walt Disney World" is currently available in my Etsy Store. has been SOLD!

Catching-up Part II

After finishing Wicked, I decided it was time to create a piece that wasn’t a present and would help me refine my skills a bit farther. Since I was still getting my drawing skills back into shape after several years of disuse, I decided to do another reproduction piece. Subjects with a more “cartoony” style seem to work best for paper work, so I turned to one of my favorite poster artists, Eric Tan. Eric has created quite a few posters for Pixar’s feature animation films beginning with The Incredibles, so while you may not know his name, you’ve probably seen his work. His style is heavily influenced by advertising posters of 1920’s – 1940’s and utilizes the strong graphic and geometric elements favored during that period.

Here’s a little sample of Mr. Tan’s awesome poster work:

             

    The Incredibles (2004)             Ratatouille (2007)                     Wall-E (2008)

           

            Up (2009)                                 Cars 2 (2011)                 Sleeping Beauty (1959)   

I finally settled on this piece from Ratatouille because it required me to figure out how to do some soft-edged gradient transitions (like the change from deep to middle red in the logo lettering). Plus, it would look good in my kitchen:

                              

                           Eric Tan’s Original           My Tribute: paper  Art Size: 9.5”x 6”

I solved the shading issue by cutting the basic shape of the darker color, using a fairly wide brush to wet the paper on the blending edge and scraping it with the blunt end of the brush. This allowed me to give it a torn, fuzzy effect but with more control than just tearing the paper. I then glued this fuzzy-edged piece to a normal piece of the lighter red.

               

Please excuse my John-Madden-esque highlighting, but I couldn’t resist.

Next, I needed to do a reverse-cut of the lettering on the background sheet so my long strip of gradient paper could show through. This required drawing the Ratatouille logo on the backside of the background sheet backwards. Luckily, I had fairly perfect this technique during the Wicked piece.

I then carefully cut out all the letters, saving them so I could use the interior pieces for the R, A’s and O. This was fairly difficult since the background paper I used was relatively thin, unlike most of the card stock I tend to use.

          

Once the lettering was cut-out, I glued the gradient piece to the back of the background Finally, I glued the half-oval, triangles and oval into the R, A’s and O respectively (a procedure which required tweezers and much patience.)

         

I decided to use the reverse cut technique for the Disney-Pixar portion of the logo and learned it doesn’t work so well with non-blocky lettering smaller than about 1 inch tall. These letters just weren’t as neat and crisp as I would have liked (again, the thinness of the background paper played a part in my difficulties.) Since this project was about learning what works and what doesn’t, I’m not very upset with the final product. I’ll just do it differently next time.

The rest of the piece was pretty standard construction, just layering the different colors. Below, you’ll see how I added Remy’s eye which is made of three separate Layers:

      

I used the gradient technique again for Remy’s belly (above), ear and nose as well as the “Bon Appetite” along the right side of the rolling pin.

All in all, I think I did good service to the original art  and I’m very happy with the final product. One of these days I get around to matting it and hanging it in the kitchen.

Please tune in next time when we’ll visit The Hatbox Ghost at Disneyland’s The Haunted Mansion.

Catching-up

I decided it was finally time to carve out a little corner of Web to display my cut-paper work for more than my family and Facebook friends – especially since I would like to start selling some pieces. So, here is catch-up of what I’ve been up to over the past two years:

When my niece Madelynn was born in February 2010, I decided to forgo the standard cute baby outfit or stuffed animal, instead making something a bit more personal. I’d been toying with the idea of layered paper for a while and this seemed the perfect situation to use the technique. The resulting piece, based on the Dr. Seuss classic Horton Hatches the Egg, showed her full name and birth date floating on clouds above the Jungle Nool where a pair of Horton-styled elephants stared proudly at a just-hatched, pink elephant-bird. Unfortunately, I either neglected to take any pictures since I was trying to get it in the mail or the pictures are hiding in some sub-subfolder on my hard drive.

In late November in 2010, my cousin Jenn and her husband Chris finally decided to take life’s big plunge and get married. Being an eclectic couple, they decided on an outdoor, twilight ceremony at the Pagoda in Reading, PA. This seemed another good opportunity to stretch my creative muscles and push my paper skills farther.

After searching the web, I managed to find this postcard of the Pagoda from 1915 and thought it would be the perfect basis for a piece:

You’ll notice I changed the season to Fall in the final piece to reflect their date choice.

Pagoda Wedding: Paper, oil pastel and stamp ink. Art size 8x10, Matted/Framed 11x14

Art projects and such fell by the wayside during the busy 2010 holiday season (especially since I have two small children), and I really didn’t get a chance to get back to work until my mom’s birthday in March 2011. My mom is a HUGE Wizard of Oz fan, particularly the Wicked Witch of the West. She saw Wicked on Broadway and loved it so much, she took me, my wife and my older daughter to see it a second time. The original Playbill art is perfect for a cut-paper illustration:

Which made my choice pretty much a no-brainer.

Wicked: Paper and art marker, Art size: 11x14, Matted/Framed: 16x20

My cut-paper version is very close to the original design with only some slight modifications:

• Using a shinny black/charcoal paper for Elphaba’s hat band and hair so it would stand out a bit from the matte black of the dress and hat.
• Separating the Elphaba’s hair into snake-like locks which I then layered and wove for a more interesting texture.
• Adding highlights to Glinda’s hair

To achieve an incised dimensional look, I reverse-cut the WICKED logo lettering from Elphaba’s dress and then backed it with a textured white paper. 

Although it is difficult to see in the above photo, the Flying Monkeys are actually made from three pieces (two wings and a body) of gray paper which I then detailed with a darker gray marker. 

So this takes us through March of 2011. Please tune in next time for my tribute to Pixar’s Ratatouille.